


Only Stars are guiding me back

by voices_in_my_head



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: 52 weeks challenge, Post-Civil War, music is the best thing for the soul
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-13
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2018-06-08 02:20:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6835057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voices_in_my_head/pseuds/voices_in_my_head
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And so, when the last scientist left the lab around eight pm on a Thursday, T’Challa entered some minutes later with a CD player."</p>
<p>Or T'Challa thinks Bucky's lab is too empty and spends his nights there listening to CDs carefully hand-picked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only Stars are guiding me back

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Лишь звёзды приведут меня назад](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10315067) by [IryStorm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IryStorm/pseuds/IryStorm), [WTF_Avengers_2017](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WTF_Avengers_2017/pseuds/WTF_Avengers_2017)



> Prompt was free and I have too many feelings about Civil War, so here we are.

T’Challa did not enjoy the blankness of Sergeant Barnes’ lab, for lack of a better word. He understood it did not need to look comfortable or peaceful, especially when its main occupant had been put in a frozen sleep, but it still didn’t feel right. It was like Sergeant Barnes was just another object in the room, which he was certainly not. T’Challa couldn’t simply put paintings everywhere around the room; it did need to look professional, after all, or a TV showing old films, but he felt something needed to be done.

And so, when the last scientist left the lab around eight pm on a Thursday, T’Challa entered some minutes later with a CD player.

He did not know the types of music Sergeant Barnes liked, since unsurprisingly his Wikipedia page did not hold that information, and while he was sure Steve would have been able to help, he had decided not to call the other man. Partly because that would entail explaining himself and partly because… well, he was not sure. Because he thought Steve had more important things to do than talk about his childhood friend’s musical taste? Well, he may not have known the Captain for very long, but he was sure that Steve would more than welcome the chance to share memories about his friend. No, that was not it. T’Challa didn’t want to look too closely at the reasons he had decided to put a CD playing in the lab or why he’d decided to find the Sergeant some music without questioning anyone.

T’Challa had decided to take all Russian music from the list, just in case. He had nothing against Russian music himself, but he felt like it might not be the best choice in that case. When Sergeant Barnes woke up, he could tell him if he’d made the right choice or not. Well, if they ever talked about this little experiment. No, not experiment; improvement was the word T’Challa preferred. If he’d been put to sleep for an undetermined amount of time, he would have liked people to make sure that life was still around.

T’Challa had also taken from the list upbeat songs, metal ones or rap ones. Again, nothing personal against the styles but T’Challa felt like there was a special sound that should surround the room, even if he wasn’t sure of what that sound would be yet.

Classical music had felt like the appropriate choice and so T’Challa had taken several CDs from his personal collection and taken them to the room. He sat some feet from the cryo camera and put the first CD on.

Chopin had always been a personal favourite, though not all his compositions. T’Challa had immediately decided against “Etudes”. They were great, but he thought that for the first night they would not be the correct sound. He had gone instead for Nocturne. As prince he had learnt to play three instruments, and while he had enjoyed the violin and cello enough, the piano had always been his favourite. Unfortunately, aside from music, he had also spent much of his time studying other languages and sciences and History and in the end, he had not been able to give himself to the piano as he had wished. So while he could play reasonably well, he did not have the ability to give the respect to Chopin’s Nocturnes that they deserved, to his great regret.

They went over the CD in a bit less than two hours, with T’Challa having after around half an hour taken out his phone to check his appointments for the next day, along as to look for what was going on around the world. Wakanda might stay out of the radar, but it did not mean that they were not a part of Earth.

Once the CD finished T’Challa thought of putting on a new one, but he needed to sleep and while he could have simply left the music playing and gone away, it did not feel right to leave the Sergeant with the music alone. He did not know why his gut was telling him that. Music could surely not hurt the Sergeant, not more than everything else had. T’Challa didn’t particularly enjoy not being able to understand his feelings, but he enjoyed even less ignoring his gut, when it had proved correct so many times, so he put the CD player in an empty draw in a desk alongside the CDs and left without a word.

.

T’Challa was back the next night. He had spent more time during the day thinking of the CD he would play that night than he should have, yet there was nothing he could do about it except call the previous one a curious endeavour not to be repeated, which he would not.

That night he had thought to try some Bach, yet putting on the first CD it did not feel right. Toccata et Fugue was too strong, as were the Brandenburg Concerts and Minuet also did not sit right with him. With a sigh T’Challa decided to change the compositor. Beethoven was one of his favourites, and he immediately thought of the 5Th Symphony, but it wouldn’t have felt right in the lab, with its white walls surrounding them and the desks and experimentation notes everywhere. Stille was exactly what the name said it was. It felt right to listen at night, to run away, but he didn’t think it was what the Sergeant needed to hear so he dismissed that one too. In the end, he of course went for Moonlight Sonata, after that choosing carefully the sonatas to listen to and the ones to skip over.

This time, T’Challa left his phone in his pocket. The night before he had thought that it would be weird to sit around in the room with just the old music surrounding him and the Sergeant, but it had been a pause from his duties, and he already knew his schedule for the whole week by heart, and if anything important happened in the world, someone would come running to tell him.

So, T’Challa sat a bit closer to the camera and closed his eyes, letting the music wash over him.

.

It continued like that. Every night T’Challa would take around two hours for himself, music and hopefully give some enjoyment to the Sergeant. Nothing in his body ever changed, so T’Challa did not have a clue whether the man could hear the music or not, but he sincerely doubted it would cause him harm, so he continued.

It had taken him a while to decide the moment was right for Vivaldi, with his joyful Seasons and Gloria, but one day, strangely enough a bad one, it had felt right. After that he had not been afraid to bring some joy into the room.

Debussy’s Clair de Lune he had already played over four times, simply because it was one of his favourites of all time. After the fourth he had decided some more singing would not do harm, and so had taken the CDs back to his room, having gone back the next day with a whole new pile.

T’Challa couldn’t completely explain, but Edith Piaf had been his first choice. He spoke French with almost no foreign accent, but it had taken him years to accept that French was not the devil’s doing. English, Russian, Japanese… they had been hard, but French… he couldn’t explain it, but for T’Challa it had been the worst of them all. Yet, he had come to terms with the language, and a big part of the reason had been Edith Piaf and her beautiful voice.

And so, he and the Sergeant had listened to most of her themes, moving on to several other French singers, such as Francis Lemarque and André Claviu. After that there had been traditional Czech folk, South African Jazz, the vibrations of Brazilian traditional music and many others. T’Challa had forgotten he possessed most of those titles.

He was glad they were no longer gaining dust on his shelves. Metaphorically, of course; everything in his room was cleaned several times a week.

He hoped the Sergeant was enjoyed the music as well.

.

Bucky, who had requested for him to call him by name after only some minutes of having been awake, had become a fixture in his life. T’Challa was not sure how it had happened, but he did not regret it in the least. It was, without a doubt, the least conventional relationship he had ever been in – which was saying something after Ororo – but also one of the happiest and healthiest. They both had their issues and communication didn’t always come easy, sometimes both thinking that closing themselves off would lead to a positive outcome, which of course never happened.

Steve had also become a fixture in his life, mostly seen in the background shaking his head and saying things that T’Challa, for the good of diplomacy, chose to ignore.

Yet, even in the hardest moments, there was one thing they were not willing to give up: music. Every night the two of them would sit in T’Challa’s sofa in his room and listen to a CD. T’Challa had decided that after so many months of choosing, it was time to leave it in Bucky’s hands. Bucky seemed to have decided to play a joke on him in the beginning, deciding for a Lady Gaga’s CD, but T’Challa had simply shrugged and accepted it. It was not his type, but he appreciated the woman’s voice and if it was what Bucky wanted to hear, he had nothing against it.

Bucky continued to Rihanna, Ke$ha, Beyoncé, Shakira… T’Challa had never heard most of the songs, especially the ones that had never made it to the radio stations, but he had fun watching Bucky swing his hips to the rhythm and eventually joining him with a laugh.

It was routine after that. They danced to most boys’ bands like Backstreet Boys, One Direction, Big Time Rush and others T’Challa hadn’t even known existed and then Bucky had switched to John Meyer, Justin Timberlake, Ed Sheeran, James Bay and another dozen and suddenly over a year had passed since Bucky had woken up and T’Challa was being forced to buy several new shelves.

He wouldn’t change it for the world.

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Only Stars are Guiding Me Back](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6883453) by [DuendeVerde4](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DuendeVerde4/pseuds/DuendeVerde4)




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